An undersea fibre optic cable between Latvia and Sweden, damaged at the end of January – Sweden suspects Russian foul play. Earlier that month, a fleet of Nato vessels assembles off the coast of Estonia to guard undersea cables from sabotage. In the UK, MPs and Lords are due to investigate the vulnerabilities of undersea cables, thanks to an inquiry initiated by the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy. We think we live in a wireless world, or perhaps we believe that the instant communication we take for granted depends mostly on Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites glittering above us.
Yet, in truth, it is the fibre-optic cables stretched for thousands of miles across ocean beds around the globe which bind our hyperconnected world. The first commercial cable was laid on the bottom of the English Channel in 1850: since that time a vast network of cables, and a vast industry of cable-laying and repair, has grown to keep us all talking to each other, to keep our economies on their path of alarming growth.
The novelist Colum McCann has always had a powerful interest in the strength and fragility of these kinds of webs, and how human achievement and politics entwine. His 2013 novel TransAtlantic wove the stories of Alcock and Brown, the first non-stop transatlantic fliers in 1919, into the narrative of Frederick Douglass, looping out to the Irish peace process in the late 1990s; in 2009, Let the Great World Spin used Philippe Petit’s 1974 high-wire walk between the Twin Towers as mechanism and metaphor. So perhaps it’s no wonder that in Twist he dives below the ocean’s surface to examine what connects us and what keeps us apart.
Anthony Fennell is an Irish journalist at a loose end, a man in middle age with an estranged ex-wife and a 16-year-old son he hasn’t seen in five years. Yes, an old-school protagonist, and one with a world-weary air (“I had no interest in cables”) that sets the reader up, in a familiar way, for a change in the weather. He gets a call from his editor, who has a yen for a piece about undersea cables – having just discovered how reliant we all are on them. She finds a ship for him, the Georges Lecointe, one of the busiest cable-repair vessels in the world. He’s to get himself to Cape Town, where the ship lies at anchor, and see what he can see.
John Conway – taciturn, Northern Irish – is the man in charge of the cable repair; he grudgingly accepts Fennell’s proposal that he come along for the ride. But we know at the outset that all will not end happily: “I am not here to make an elegy for John A Conway,” Fennell tells us on the book’s opening page: so the question in the reader’s mind is how, not what. McCann gifts Conway a glamorous South African partner, Zamele, an actor who will later find great fame (or notoriety, depending on how you think about it), but no spoilers here.
Yet it is not the revelation of Conway’s eventual fate that provides the novel’s suspense. Conway is also a freediver, heading down and down into ocean depths without oxygen for minutes at a time, and McCann gives his tale the sense of a held breath, a claustrophobic pressure as the Georges Lecointe powers out from Cape Town searching for a cable break. McCann’s compressed language brings us on to the ship, as the men move as “a working ballet, all muscle and ratchet. The air smelled – almost tasted – of thick oil. It went into the gaps between my teeth.”
Fennell is a kind of Ishmael, observing the slow tragic fall of his Ahab, Conway. Aboard the Georges Lecointe there is an atmosphere of secrecy and eventually discontent, as the men’s access to computer and phone time is mysteriously cut – a mirror of the reader’s dependency on such technology.
If Conway remains unknowable, this is another mirror, of the vast abyssal zone where humans dare to lay the fragile threads that allow us, however briefly, to feel that we are linked. In those slender cables is “the velocity of who we are. Every scrap of existence colliding inside the tubes: the weak force, the strong force, the theory of everything. And, of course, every inanity whirling inside there too. All of it tumbling in unison along the seafloor.” Part thriller, part existential mediation on self, Twist is a strange and satisfying book that reaches for the depths.
Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from Bookshop.org, who support independent bookshops
Twist
Colum McCann
Bloomsbury, 239pp, £18.99
[See also: The Beatles’ brilliant friendship]
Content from our partners
This article appears in the 19 Mar 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Golden Age